42 the Kennedy Administration tells me he is dismayed by Stephanopoulos's behavior but isn't sure wh "I've been asking my- se 'Why am I troubled by it, if that's what he honestly feels? Should he sup- press his honest feelings out of loyalty to the man to whom he owes so much?'" And the unspoken answer is: Well, yes. That's one of the reasons that the major Kennedy scandals-mostly about his putative sexual escapades-arose only posthumousl ("There were pretty girls around, but why not?" ScWesinger says, ha1f-musingl "It's remained a mystery to me how much was going on. And it never interfered with the course of bus i- ness. I have the general feeling that ques- tions which no one has a right to ask are not entitled to a truthful answer.") Even where there were grave differences over matters of principle and policy; the protocol used to be that you would qui- etly resign, citing family or other oppor- tunities. "That's what people did in the Johnson Administration over Vietnam," ScWesinger says. "They got out." And, for the most part, kept quiet. ScWesinger mentions the study "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty," by the brilliant economist and social theorist Albert O. Hirschman; but in that book, published in 1970, Hirsch- man found reason to complain about a surfeit of political loyalty: Just think how relieved people would be, he wrote, "if at least one of the public officials 'drop- ping out' of the Johnson administration in disagreement over Viemam had there- upon publicly fought official war poli- cies." Autres temps, autres mæurs. I got a sense of how far we've come when I spoke with Rahm Emanuel, a senior adviser to the President on pol- icy and strategy; about the new style of political defection. He was philosophi- cal about those who had left the ,fold ("You could point to Leon and George, but I could give you counter-examples, like Mickey Kantor and Harold Ickes"), and the ideological defectors plainly trou- bled him least. "Look, certain people in Health and Human Services resigned over the we1fare bill, like Peter Edelman, who waited until after the election to do it," he said. "I respect him for it. I don't think that was disloyal, I think that was loyal. There was an idea that crossed a line for him, and he resigned because of it." The perennial question, of course, is where the line is to be drawn. "It's easy to say you're for loyalty until loyalty conflicts with another value, and then you have to A FALSE SPRING (She who'd been taken hostage-when?-been bound and drugged, kept in all things in the dark, now at last found she'd begun to waken.) So gently that year did February come on, it teased out the crocus, ha!f-hid in snow, gilded the willows, eased the forsythia into bloom. (But a good hard blow sent her blindly back under. Escape? A mere dream, and that the dream came in a glow of green, of gold, no wonder.) wrestle with those angels," Paul Begala says, voicing the post-Watergate consen- sus. Leon Panetta tells me that he doesn't see why institutional loyalties should trump basic convictions. "When you work within an operation, loyalty is owed and you have to defend what you have to defend," he says. "But you ought not to have to defend something that you don't believe. For one thing, you can't defend it very well. There is a line in your con- science that you shouldn't have to cross." He knows that some of his public com- ments in the wake of the Lewinsky affair haven't endeared him to Clinton's spin doctors, but, he insists, "whether you are inside or outside the operation, you owe it to people you work with to speak truthfull And I am at peace with what I have said." George Stephanopoulos in- vokes the example of Bill Moyers, who was accused of betrayal when he left the Johnson Administration and made public his opposition to Vietnam: "He might have argued that he couldn't defend the indefensible after leaving, because there were other principles being violated, in- volving the morality of the war and the honesty of how it was talked about." Indeed, everyone I spoke to who might have been accused of disloyalty invoked the primacy of principle, and even those whose loyalty has never been questioned discussed their loyalty as something to be piloted carefully around the shoals of principle. ' sk me if the President ever -BRAD LEITHAUSER tested my loyalty; and the answer is yes," Carville says. "But not over sex. I was way more torn about cutting illegal im- migrants off we1fare-I was just ripped by it. I was way more upset about Dick Morris walking in and out of the Oval Office than about anything Monica Lew- insky might or might not have done." " I N some respects, loyalty is more pre- cious than ever, because there's so lit- tle of it," one disaffected former Clinton staffer tells me. "It's the law of supply and demand working." He sees the phenom- enon of endemic disloyalty in economic terms, too. "Some of the former Clinton aides are paid large sums of money not because they have special insight into the real inner workings of whafs going on but because they're in a position to dump shit on people they used to work for. That's what makes news, and that's what news organizations like. So there's a par- ticular pressure on people now to estab- lish themselves as independent voices, if they want to maintain paying jobs in the media. I mean, no one's going to make a career out of going out and be- ing Bill Clinton's defender in the press. That's not where you make a career." Stephanopoulos, for his part, plausi- bly defends himself against such im- plications. "Look at the history," he says. "First of all, I have a proven record of loyalty-I would say spotless in my time of service. Even after I left, I have never